>>11321 If you're talking about the four Iowas specifically, between 1996 and 2008 BAE actually made upgrade kits for them to modernize and automate their boiler-turbines, bringing them nearly in line with modern manning standards while also extending their service lives by another 20-30 years. This all with very detailed plans on how they would do these rebuilds inside the ships using already existing hatches and not have to cut any holes in the decks. The obsolete boiler-turbines are ironically not a large problem for the Iowas. You are correct overall that it would be better to just build new, though.

>build submarine drone >drone seeks civilian cargo ships of an enemy nation >follows and attaches itself to cargo ship past sundown >missile launcher robot/crane with magnets climbs up the ship's hull a bit so any missiles it launches will show up as having a surface origin on any nearby warship's sensors >fires missile at IDF/NATO assets, then gets off >drone destroys itself by sinking to crush depth >m-muh Iranian Q-Ships, oy gevalt ids anudda shoah!!! Retarded, possible or already been done?

>>11324 You over-complicate things. There's no need to have the drone spiderman its way up the side of the ship, just pick a container ship to be your dummy and position the drone to radar mask itself from your unwitting USS Liberty stand-in using the container ship. Position the drone within the resolution limit of the target ship's radar when it surfaces/fires, and the targeted ship won't be able to tell the difference between the drone and the container ship, so you could even have the missiles fired out the bow of the drone like torpedoes. Thanks to Russia/China using palletized missile launchers that are disguised as shipping containers, the gloves have come off in that regard and now everyone has them. So, if the drone isn't caught the target ship's nation would 'be forced' to assume it came from the container ship since all relevant data from the targeted ship would indicate it 'probably' came from the container ship. Obviously, the container ship would be innocent and any thorough investigation would reveal that, but that would take a long time to work out. Not really a factor if you're trying to false flag.

>>11323 Considering that steam is still widely used, it sounds like those upgrade packs would have been mostly off-the-shelf components. My gut feeling is that they would have used the same systems that are in place on nuclear vessels, not because those are inherently better than what are used for e.g. district heating, but simply because they can bill the government for more money that way.

With F-35B's VTOL. every ship with a helicopter pad house the best jet ever.

>>11327 launching planes is not a problem, the problem is maintaining them, and it is quite a needy plane. Landing too is generally a problem. And dont forget that brits needed to reinforce the deck of their aircraft carriers specifically so that f-35 does not melt the deck. In any case, the ability to launch planes is most likely inferior to holding its weight in missiles.

Naval-based jet fighters are the best.

>>11328 That wasn't just a Brit issue, even the US had to do that; that was a multi-billion dollar affair. In any case, the primary value of a ship-borne fixed-wing aircraft on any ship less than a CVL is in reconnaissance; probably the only thing on the F-35 that has 'worked' since the start (within historical military expectations of new-tech reliability) is the sensor package. But you are correct, the maintenance would be the primary problem. In order to make one work on a surface combatant, you'd be talking a ship that is at minimum an Aviation Cruiser like some kind of a modernized Tone-class.

>>11329 Props are great too. Tell me pic related does not fill your heart with many mixed emotions.

Can a Gripen to made to land on aircraft carriers? >>11331 It's beautiful...

What kind of shenanigans could be permitted in the construction of an aircraft carrier with an 80-90% unmanned aircraft complement? Some kind of rail+box system for aircraft storage management with a small hangar for individual craft maintenance by human crew, theoretically improving fire safety and DC+armor schemes compared to conventional designs with large central hangars ripe for BBQ in the event of an AShM penetration?

>>11333 Practically speaking, there'd be no major differences between UAV carriers and conventional CVs. UAVs take up just about the same footprint as conventional aircraft do, both for storage and maintenance, while gaining nothing much in terms of weight; so, your physical requirements between the platforms are virtually identical. On your specific idea of individual aircraft storage, speaking purely from memory here (meaning I could be wrong): that has actually been considered by the Brits and Americans, but was soundly rejected. Speaking from a purely technical standpoint now: Firstly, it would greatly exacerbate the already laborious process of maintaining the air wing. The amount of work that a single maintenance team could do would be greatly limited. To be clear, I believe it would be plausible for low numbers of aircraft (based on very loose napkin math, up to 5 ought to be 'within human limits'), but any more than that and your space-limited maintenance crew would not be able to keep up. In order then to have enough maintenance throughput to actually keep the aircraft operational, you'd have to duplicate the entire hangar/maintenance system. Furthermore, said system would not be small by any means, and it would be extremely heavy for the number of aircraft it held. For a simple comparison, if my figures are even within the correct ballpark, a CV the size (and displacement) of a Ford-class with this system would only be able to carry ~35-40 full sized aircraft when at maximum capacity- in other words less than half. Secondly, and what would really be the most damning, is it would actually jeopardize the ship's damage control ability and even general seaworthiness. While there would be some degree of fire and blast protection, as stated the system wouldn't even remotely be light (it'd be much heavier than the old British twin-hangar deck system) and by necessity of design (it cannot take up the same room as the powerplant) it would all have to be located very high up on the ship's hull. This would drag the metacenter of gravity of the ship well, well above the water line, which in turn would make storms matters of life and death for the ship, with any form of damage below the waterline resulting in a near instantaneous capsizing. Again, plausible for very low numbers of aircraft (such as helicopters or limited recon aircraft on a surface warfare ship, essentially a modernized floatplane doctrine), but for anything more than that it'd be beyond impractical unless you got into CVBB (Ultra-Carrier) territory and only wanted to carry the same number of aircraft as a Supercarrier.

>>11334 >(such as helicopters or limited recon aircraft on a surface warfare ship, essentially a modernized floatplane doctrine) Could ~3 armored storage comparments each carrying 1-2 supersonic fighter-reconnaissance drones make sense in a Battlecruiser or Battleship, especially if you've got Lockheeb levels of money to spend on a pad capable of surviving STOVL landings or a vertical launch bay? Sure such a ship's escorts would handle the bulk of aerial reconnaissance but it can never hurt to have some additional reserves especially if Sats get Kessler'd.

>>11335 There's no particular reason why you couldn't have that if you were talking a missile ship, but really, since the system would already be heavily compartmentalized there'd be no actual reason to have more than 1 of the systems with 3-5 'slots'. You do, however, need to seriously consider the concept of operations for the aircraft. If you're wanting them to operate without the assistance of satellite coverage, you must realize that they have to be tethered either to a friendly manned aircraft (eg: the loyal wingman program the USAF is trying for) or to their launching ship itself. In the latter case, this would severely limit the range at which the aircraft could operate (especially in an ECM environment). As a result, your UAV would be mostly limited to being an airborne early warning platform, which is a highly necessary role anyway, so you may as well just specialize the aircraft for the role in the first place and have it only operate within the air defense sphere of its operating ship. A VTOL E-2 Hawkeye, essentially. This would to some degree actually remove the need for the ship to operate with a CV as it could handle its own reconnaissance.

>>11336 >sat-less operation >loyal wingman In that case slaving the UAVs to a manned C&C craft from an escort or the ship itself makes obvious sense, though with recent advances in >muh AI I wonder if old timey navigation might at one point be possible at a reasonable accuracy without a constant radio tether to a mothership or command craft, especially for passive reconnaissance. Furthermore is it unreasonable to produce small-ish reconnaissance craft focused on all-angle IRST to complement conventional Radar AWAC? For extra paranoia could such UAVs and their motherships/command craft use a combination of lasers and Infrared signal lights for basic low-bandwidth datalinking?

Speaking of drones,I have a strong suspicion that with the powers of modern technology a drone based on the Lerche could work, and I can see it being useful on a ship. Granted, it would be only a turboprop, but that might be even better if you just want a group flying sensor suites that buzz around a ship. And you could even operate them from a helicopter hangar.

>>11337 >especially for passive reconnaissance. Passive Reconnaissance by drone is performed by flying the drone over the target autonomously and then having it fly all the way back to friendly airspace (also autonomously) where it can radio back the information. The time delay is usually measured in hours if not longer. For this reason, Passive Reconnaissance limited to force estimation. It is virtually useless as a native capability for any major surface combatant. Active Reconnaissance is actually seeking out the enemy to acquire location data, and this is what could actually be used to generate shooting solutions. That is the only reason a major surface combatant would need a native reconnaissance aircraft. >Furthermore is it unreasonable to produce small-ish reconnaissance craft focused on all-angle IRST to complement conventional Radar AWAC? That is unironically more or less what the USN decided to use the F-35C for, so the idea have been proven as theoretically possible and someone is actually trying it. >For extra paranoia could such UAVs and their motherships/command craft use a combination of lasers and Infrared signal lights for basic low-bandwidth datalinking? In theory, yes.

>>11339 >Passive recon It could serve some purpose for photographing static or semi-static targets over land/coastlines such as Chinese beach fortifications the night before a naval landing provided the absence of satellites hasn't completely removed long-range Artillery or Missile fire support from the equation. >time delay Why not have the reconnaissance aircraft fire an expendable courier vehicle/missile containing a targeting solution back towards the fleet upon locating the enemy? Minutes should still be preferable to hours. Maybe space was a mistake, Satellite-free modern surface warfare is kind of fun to think about.

>>11340 >Passive recon In theory, that is the single use case that passive reconnaissance would become of some value (even if limited). However, if your order of battle has collapsed to the point you're using a battleship/cruiser for passive reconnaissance you're doing a lot of other things wrong. You'd be much better off using a hyper-sonic SR-72-esque spy plane for that. >missile the data back You just told everyone where your fleet is and exactly what it is you're doing, so you completely lose any shred of the element of surprise you may have had. Also, that's absurdly expensive. In order to get the data back to the fleet in an actionable time frame, you're talking about a hyper-sonic missile with a micro-satellite payload. In other words, about $3 million per shot, and that's just for data. Also, since you specified that the missile contains the targeting solution, you've now put your entire FCS in the aircraft. Why would you do that?

>>11341 >price The Federal Reserve can just print more, it's fine :^) >However, if your order of battle has collapsed to the point you're using a battleship/cruiser for passive reconnaissance you're doing a lot of other things wrong. >You'd be much better off using a hyper-sonic SR-72-esque spy plane for that. That scenario was envisioned for a world where Kessler happened and the US lost nearly all of its foreign military bases save for its "old guard" of heavily industrialized vassals (European NATO, Japan, ANZAC) and is now trying to engage in politics by other means in the Asian theatre, here Sats have been partially replaced by Stratospheric Airships but there's a demilitarized high altitude no-fly-zone in the Area of operations where the detection of an SR-72 would immediately put the enemy on high alert and generate an international incident. The US wants to engage in gunboat diplomacy/Vietnam-style false flagging/restore the unipolar world order through proven means but with the element of surprise, so the Admiral in charge of the BG patrolling the southern Pacific in support of to neutrally observe a US-funded anti-BRICs Asian spring in the Solomon islands decided to use one of his ship's stealth reconnaissance drones at low altitude to gather information to support the rebels in their upcoming landing at the Bay of Ants, fully prepared to put the blame on Australia should be the plane be discovered. >You just told everyone where your fleet is and exactly what it is you're doing, so you completely lose any shred of the element of surprise you may have had. >Also, since you specified that the missile contains the targeting solution, you've now put your entire FCS in the aircraft. Why would you do that? The idea behind the missile courier is to generate a targeting solution that is still "fresh" enough to let a hypothetical super-Iowa at ~1200nmi provide data to its onboard FCS+16inch shells along with nearby DDGs' AShMs so they can at least guide themselves roughly to where the enemy should be instead of running blind or on data that is hours out of date. The other option would be a radio relay picket line of aircraft and ships, but that would make the fleet even more visible than a single missile would. Maybe a compromise would be to aim the missile not at the home fleet directly but rather at another plane equipped with its own courier missile, Raytheon sure wouldn't mind.

I was gonna put a big rant here because this thread is dumb, but instead I'll say this: Once you have reclaimed the basic semblence of a Navy back from the degenerate brass office who's been siphoning money off to bring in drugs, sex traffickers and the foreign born, then it isn't the coast or the sea defenses that you're gonna need to worry about. Those seamen you employ should conduct their work in-land. Since they are (or should be) the "strong young men" class from within your society, they should be spending their economic "graph goes up" productivity on shoring up the foreign criminals and traitors and sending them homeward and spend every minute of their shifts making sure that the boats sending them homeward are completely full. If they also manage to get some productivity in, such as raising a family or producing a useful product then that's great. But I want them arranged and prepared to come deep inland and to carry out extreme efficiency for their work there. That's how you defend a country at least morally and carefully. The quadcopters and the laserbeam railguns are just going to be clumsy and easily mitigated. I will get over having fewer living men and a cleverer weaponry only when I see that the results can no longer be denied. I wouldn't shape any of the armed forces around the assumption otherwise. I just want to see living breathing men and simple guns that are proven.

>>11342 I'm sorry, that is so far out there in the realms of impossibility that you're talking pure fiction. Any circumstance where military satellites have been knowingly/intentionally downed, the gloves will come off and literally no military power is going to give a flying fuck about treaties. The SR-72 would be less likely to be detected than your UAV and especially that return missile. >but that would make the fleet even more visible than a single missile would. Unironically, no it wouldn't. You seem to have absolutely no idea how much tail signature a missile gives off. Just get rid of the missile, it's not helping you. At all. >>11343 Bud, you've completely misunderstood this thread. Also, nobody wants to hear that navies and coastal defenses are stupid from one of the few flags that could have vastly improved their lot in the world by using a navy and coast defense to sink the damn migrant ships.

>>11344 >Any circumstance where military satellites have been knowingly/intentionally downed, What about due to an accident? Maybe the US goes all in on a big ring habitat and then the Russians follow suit with one of their own but good old Soviet engineering and cost cutting causes it to shatter to all shit and in the process of spalling, takes out the American space station and then everything's completely fucked for decades. >>11342 We're kind of getting into less Naval thread territory and more Alt History thread instead.

>>11345 >What about due to an accident? That's one of those things that would be impossible to distinguish between an honest accident and an engineered 'accident'. Any military thinker worth their salt would realize the other military thinkers are thinking this was probably intentional, and in short accident or not the nukes would fly. Even if everyone actually did know it was an accident, chaos theory dictates that if one person pushes the button the only way for other powers to not lose (for absolutely nothing) is for themselves to also push the button, and nobody would be willing to bet that EVERY other guy wouldn't push the button, so everyone will push the button. This is more or less how MAD worked.

>>11346 How well would ICBMs work in a dense enough Kessler scenario?

>>11347 Very few ICBMs actually reach the heights required to be jeopardized by space debris and almost all ICBMs have INS/Tercom fallbacks that are good for <1km accuracy even if GPS goes down forever. In short, a Kessler scenario wouldn't really affect the first strike power of an ICBM.

>>11344 The thread's purpose seems to be to talk gun porn. That's alright. It being a bit of a larp or alt-history escapism - that's still alright. But you have hundreds of posts on the complexities of the big floating guns and their ability to work across oceans... When do you mention upgrading or improving the men? Or the capability of the men? Or the boats and infrastructure for the job you really need them to do (which is to venture deeply inward to strip the rot out)? Consider the issues you may think are specific or unique only to bong flags and toward their problems: we could have patrol vessels with men employed aboard ready prepared to drag boats back to wherever they came from whether the ports of the receiving country are welcoming or not and that would stop traffickers dead since they're opportunist invaders mainly and the opportunities would subsequently dry up. ThIngs like that still wouldn't affect defense of the country. The rot is now within and you need to turn at once inland, primarily with transport but possibly even with guns in order to get these "effectively" civil war combatants back out again. America, particularly the Confederate south as it happens has a similar problem, people being imported illegally most of whom hate the country and who carry nefarious ambitions on their arrival, except that your land area is bigger and the invaders more readily armed. Consider it. Consider the tech needed, and the sense of the scale required, and how pointless it is to focus on the guns when the limit to your Navy doing *anything* at this point is men willing to file in through recruitment and further to that end men who're fit enough to round up angry Arabs/Mexicans. If you want to entertain Navy hypotheticals then I'm trying to provoke you to dig at this one, because it's near and dear to this flag post, sure, but because I hope while being something of a technophobe luddite that the anons will come up with something interesting or that the fruit of understanding will be in some way sweet by it. How will your UAV and your drone carriers help those of us of the post-bongistan flag?

>>11349 Strelok, we are not as stupid as you seem to think we are, but we're also not as intelligent/capable as you appear to hope us to be. Of course we know the seat of purpose is on land, of course we know that any piece of equipment is only as good as its operator; and we're painfully aware of the decline of society and the rot that permeates deep within our respective cultures. There's absolutely nothing we can do about that, especially not here. Navies have no place in the reclaiming of civilization, technology will not and cannot mitigate the decay of society (as a matter of fact, a reliance on technology does the exact opposite). You only care about the societal rot. That's fine, but it's outside this thread's lane, you can make a new thread on it. The tengu will probably delete it, because that's what the tengu does. Regardless, there is absolutely nothing that a navy can do to reclaim civilization, but that's still not what this thread is for. This thread is for the curious asking what once was and for the dreamers who ask what could have been. This thread is for the people who woke up one morning and realized the world up and left them behind, that their wheelhouse now either rests at the bottom of the ocean or had been turned into razorblades. This thread is for those that pine for a world they never knew, or have been denied from knowing. But isn't that 90% of /k/?

Does Korean have a good navy?

>>11351 They have some of the best ships in terms of quality, but they don't have enough of them to really have an impact in anything outside their own immediate waters.

>>11352 Does the Korean People's Navy have any purpose beyond mining and gayops in the event of an inner-Korean escalation? They have SLBMs and cruise missiles on subs but their larger assets seem too old and small in number to have much of an impact unless the Artillery alpha strike at the 38th parallel somehow cripples South Korean air defense.

>>11353 I'm actually not that familiar with North Korea's navy beyond hearsay, unfortunately. From that limited perspective, however, I'd wager a guess their navy is primarily a show piece meant for internal consumption propaganda. Three quarters of their navy barely floats, for one thing.

>>11329 I still stand by my statement.

>>11355 Your 1st example was better. Larger fighters become to cumbersome to be effective in air combat when additional weight is added for shipborne capacity. IMO the Rhino is already too large to be appropriate as a carrierborne platform. Still the ASF-14 would be a better choice than the lighter F-18E solely because it by far outperfomed the later in all aspects

>>11338 What would be advantages of such a thing over helicopters?

>>11357 It would just need a simple turboprop engine and a propeller instead of all the things and stuff that goes into making a helicopter work, and yet it could still lands just like one. In fact, it might need an overall less footprint. And it would be an aircraft that can go fast. Of course, it wouldn't be a 1:1 replacement for a helicopter, because you could use it to drops e.g. sonars, but using it to collect them would be quite a bit more complicated. And it couldn't carry people, which also limits how useful it is. But you could have a hangar with a helicopter or two, and also park a few of these drones next to them, and then use whichever is appropriate.